by Emily Hall

Created on: January 18, 2009

It begins with a word.

Maybe you hear it from a friend, maybe you're snowed under with music at the moment and you don't have time, maybe you've been frantically searching for a music job for months - whichever way round it is, it all starts when someone wants to jam with you. You don't know whether they just want to jam with you or whether they want to 'jam' with you, to consider you for a job - and you don't ask, not at this stage. It's like being boyfriend and girlfriend in the school playground, 'did you mean see you later or 'see you later'?' Nobody really knows.

So you go and jam with this person, and they might turn out to be a rock band, or a punk band, or alternative, or maybe they're a covers band and sing at weddings...you won't know until you get there really. Sure, they'll tell you they're this or that but classifications and genres are no help to you. You just have to turn up and hope.

And when you turn up nobody's in, and you look at this peeling house at the back end of the East End with a padlock on the door and graffiti on the windows and you wonder where you've come - until this guy turns up and lets you in, and he's not what you imagined at all. It turns out he plays the sitar, and to begin with it looks like he really did just want to jam - and despite how much good music you're making together (or perhaps because of that) you're faintly disappointed already that it's not going to be profitable and you're not going to be able to show it to the world. And then he says 'come and meet the band', it turns out there are twelve of them.

So you go to the pub. When you get beck, you play for three hours and then he offers you a tour, and you drunkenly accept, thinking it'll all be a joke in the morning, or something, but what a great night...and it isn't a joke in the morning, so you find yourself two months later with these people that you suddenly know, who used to be just friends of friends, and all twelve of you are sleeping in a camper van in Northumberland, waiting for tomorrow. Then of course, tomorrow comes and you pour out of the tin can you slept in and you ache and grumble, you haven't had a shower for three days, but somehow you crawl up on stage and sound check, and then you sleep backstage until an hour before you're on.

Now, suddenly, it all bursts upon you that you're in a band on tour and to forget about the tiredness, forget about the fact that you slept hunched over the wheel arch, it's nearly time - and you warm up and get out there

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